Posts Tagged ‘Imagination’

I saw Alice in Wonderland this past weekend and just loved it. I decided I rather fancy the idea of thinking of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It doesn’t have to be before breakfast though it could be before bed. I do love having vivid dreams and I go to some pretty outlandish and beautiful places in my dreams. Why not create more of that? Of course, I could also think of 6 lovely things before breakfast or bed. Here’s my list today of 6 impossible things before breakfast:

1. everybody gets their own make-a-wish fairy. You get three wishes per lifetime ’cause too many and it would get boring but only three and you’d have to be really thoughtful and selective.

2. cloudy skies will now have pull back tabs that you can reach up, pull back the tabs to reveal sunny blue skies (I know Pacific Northwester’s love that one!)

3. blink and twitch my nose and the housework gets done, laundry folded and it floats down hallways into rooms, opens drawers and puts itself away

4. My summer home is a castle floating in the air and each day we have tea and marvelous cakes with some famous guest from any time in history. I’ll start with Einstein on Monday, Marilyn Monroe on Tuesday, Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, Christopher Columbus on Thursday, Jesus on Friday, Rumi on Saturday and the Tooth Fairy on Sunday.

5. It’s 3010, I’ve got the wisdom of all ages and I’m in a 25 year old body and I teach the keys to happiness and inspire the whole world.

6. Lastly, I am a small gold coin in Martin Luther King’s pocket. He slips his hand into his pocket and fingers my cool, smooth gold coin-ness while giving his speech “I have a dream…”

Yes, Martin Luther King, I have a dream too, that life is first about dreaming and building castles in the air and last about really believing in them. Everything starts out first as a vision, a dream and then stay true to it in your heart and just watch how it Becomes.

See you all in 3010. I’ll be the one accepting the Nobel Prize for finding the Keys to Happiness and I’ll give you all the scoop that the Tooth Fairy let me in on. Oh, the stories she did tell!

This post is dedicated to all of you out there who’ve never lost your sense of wonder.

You can change your world by rearranging your thoughts — having them travel
only in one direction, that is toward the fulfillment of your desire.

There is only one cause, and that is consciousness. Your consciousness is the
center from which your world mirrors and echoes the state you presently
occupy. Now, a state can be defined as all that you believe and consent to as
being true. So, if you want your world to change, you must determine what you
want to accept and consent to as true before you can change it. To arrive at a
certain definition of self, you must begin by uncritically observing your
automatic reaction to an event, for your reaction defines your state. And you can,
without getting out of your chair, rebuild your world by changing your level (or
state) of being. This is done by observing yourself uncritically as you react
to life. If you do not like the circumstances of your life, acknowledge its
cause. Be willing to admit that the circumstances are only objectifying what you
are conscious of, then change your consciousness and your world will change.
If you react to that which is being objectified, you bind yourself to a
certain, level of awareness, but if you refuse to react, the thread is broken. Stop
being conscious of something unlovely, for every unlovely thought causes you
to walk in psychological mud. Rather, identify yourself with beauty, with love
(the Your in you) and you will ascend the infinite level of your own being and
change the circumstances of your life.

Your state of awareness, like a magnet, attracts life. Steel, in its demagnetized
state is a whirling mass of electrons, but when the electrons are faced in one
direction, the steel is magnetized. You do not add to the steel to make it
magnetic or take anything away to demagnetize it. This same principle is
true for you. You can change your world by rearranging your thoughts and having
them travel only in one direction, and that is toward the fulfillment of your
desire.

Watch your reactions to life, for any change in the arrangement of your mind
which can be detected by self-observation, will cause a change in your outer
world. It is important to learn to be passive to that which is unlovely and
unacceptable to you. In that way, you are awakening the dynamic one within.
And when you find your inner being, you will discover that the qualities you
condemn in others are really in yourself. Then you will know the secret of
forgiveness, for as you forgive yourself, the others are forgiven.
All things (not just a few) are made manifest by the light, and everything
manifested is light. The moment you consent to a thought, it is made manifest.
It could not come into being unless you consented to its expression by being
aware of it. The universe moves with motiveless necessity as it has no motive
of its own. Rather, it moves under the necessity of manifesting the
arrangements of the minds of men. This teaching is to awaken you to your light,
and the awakening begins by self-observation.

The thing I like most about waking up in the middle of the night is choosing then to spend time consciously creating my next day. Last night laying there, I thought about my day and how I would like to feel during the day. I began to breathe consciously and then silently say: I breathe life into ease, for instance. And then I’d stop and feel the body sense of what ease would feel like and stay there long enough to feel how good it feels. And then I went on to silently repeat: I breathe life into contentment. And again I’d pause and feel what contentment feels like in the body, I’d practice in my mind’s eye walking around wearing contentment. One thing led to the next and it began a whole series of “I breathe life into….” It was the most delicious experience.

Today, what I am experiencing is exactly what I breathed life into. I think I’ll try this whenever I wake up during the night, it will give me something to look forward to. Oh goodie, I’m awake, time to play with my new process :). And before you know it, I’m back asleep and the me who wakes up is the one I befriended during the night. Just another way I make my inner world a friendly place to be. The world cannot help but reflect that back.

Following up on my Two Minds post, I’m including below Neville’s words on the topic of two minds or allegiance to the inner/outer world. This is an excerpt from Awakened Imagination. Awakened Imagination is a very short read and a great overview on the teachings of Neville Goddard.

I noticed that Wayne Dyer recently thanked Neville Goddard on his PBS special, Excuses Be Gone, for his inspriation on a process he developed from Neville’s work. I also wrote about my own processes that I adapted from Neville’s teachings under the posts: The Art of Revision, Playing It Forward and Creating Probable Realities.

If you were to read one book of Neville’s, Awakened Imagination would be my highest recommendation.

“Because life molds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds, there is no way of bringing about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves. No help cometh from without; the hills to which we lift our eyes are those of an inner range. It is thus to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained. We can rely absolutely on the justice of this law to give us only that which is of the nature of ourselves.

To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change. As within, so without.

If we would become as emotionally aroused over our ideals as we become over our dislikes, we would ascend to the plane of our ideals as easily as we now descend to the level of our dislikes.”

I last wrote about Neville’s Art of Revision in this lovely tradition of ending the day just before sleep and taking an event or two that didn’t pan out quite the way I wanted and revising how I experienced it in my imagination. I purposely am not revising the actual event only my experience of it. I am allowing a state of inner alignment to come forth rather than making something happen in my outer world. I’m so loving doing this, too, as it effects a state of inner harmony. I actually look forward to the end of the day and going to sleep and what might I revise today.

Now I’ve decided to play it forward a little bit. This is somewhat like Abraham’s Segment Intending except again I am not pre-paving how a future event unfolds, instead I’m imagining how I feel and experience the day. I’m spending a little bit of time even before I get out of bed to do this.

I can’t say yet if anything has changed in my external world but my internal experience has shifted. This practice is to be generous in spirit to my self. It is an act truly of befriending the self and I can only imagine good emanating from that.

This is a Neville quote below and then following that my comments. Neville Goddard did many lectures and was very popular in So. Cal back in the 50’s and 60’s. He would fill a lecture hall and speak on the power of imagination. It’s a lost art perhaps and here he talks about the art of revision.

“Now this morning I have brought you the means by which this mighty power in us may be awakened. I call it the art of revision. I take my day and I review it in my mind’s eye. I start with the first incident in the morning. I go through the day – when I come to any scene in my unfolding day that displeased me, or if it didn’t displease me, if it was not as perfect as I thought it could have been, I stop right there and I revise it. I re-write it, and after I have re-written it so that it conforms to the ideal I wished I had experienced, then I experience that in my imagination as though I had experienced it in the flesh. I do it over and over until it takes on the tone of reality, and experience convinces me that that moment that I have revised and relived will not recede into my past. It will advance into my future to confront me as I have revised it. If I do not revise it, these moments, because they never recede and they always advance, will advance to confront me perpetuating that strange, unlovely incident. But if I refuse to allow the sun to descend upon my wrath so that at the end of a day I never accept as final the facts of the day, no matter how factual they are, I never accept them, and revising it I repeal the day and bring about corresponding changes in my outer world.”

Another aspect that Neville teaches, is to engage imaginative events playing out right before you fall asleep. I think the reasoning behind that is because you plant seed in a fertile, non-resistant ground while you slumber. I like the art of revision but instead of using it to revise an entire day, that just seems like too much effort and I like easy, so instead I will pick one significant experience I had during the day and revise it in my imagination, in my mind’s eye, right before I go to sleep. As I understand it, the idea is not to necessarily change events themselves but instead revise my direct of experience of them, though you could probably play around with revising whatever you wanted to. I love how he says in revising it: I repeal the day. In essence, I nullify whatever day’s event was displeasing to me and I start anew.